Day 7: Húsavík, Goðafoss, Akureyri and Siglufjörður: Iceland

Already back from the trip, didn’t have time at night to do days 7, 8, 9 and 10 but I’m trying now. It’s never as good days after when you can’t remember all the little details though. Either way, Day 7 started early just like every morning on this trip since everyone was in the same room and the littlest person that lives with us just cannot keep his wiggles and sounds to himself and MUST share them with EVERYONE else in the room as soon as it turns 6am, sometimes earlier. I tried to keep him in bed and quiet for as long as possible, didn’t work all that well.

We had breakfast at our “hotel”, which was really a house converted into a “hotel”, which was like most of the places we stayed. I remember that pickled herring was on the table set out for folks if they were in the mood, I had a pickled herring plate for dinner on the first night we were in town but could never pull the trigger for breakfast.

After breakfast I took the boys out for a short walk around the harbor in Húsavík both because it a short walk and because there were a couple geocaches but mostly because it’s impossible to pack up the room while three crazy horses are trampling everything. We found two on our short walk, one an old church built out of Norwegian wood supposedly in a Swiss style although that’s been debated in the comments on the geocache log (you can see pictures there) and the other right outside the whale musuem, which we would have loved to have visited but it opened at 10am and we had plans for the day (lots of driving!). Here’s a shot of one of the boats in the harbor that we walked / skipped / ran by:

The dudes and I walked around a bit more (saw some REALLY interesting looking shops right on the waterfront where guys were working on fixing boats) and then headed back to the guesthouse to help Mommy finish the packing.

Our first stop for the day was at another amazing waterfall (Goðafoss), which also happened to be REALLY cold, so cold in fact that the mist from the waterfall was frozen on top of the sand and rocks leading up to the waterfall which made walking a bit of an adventure.

The biggest one and I went and tracked down the geocache that was at this waterfall and we took a bunch of pictures:

got some wiggles out and then packed it in for the long drive up to the northern most point that we’d hit on the trip. We needed a break on the way and so we ended up spending a bunch of the afternoon walking around the second biggest “city” in Iceland (Akureyri) where we had a great lunch at a hostel / restaurant, took pictures with a couple trolls (Karen hasn’t uploaded her pictures yet), found a couple geocaches (had to walk the dogs, err kids) and then went to this “christmas shop” (in Icelandic: Jólahúsið) which was supposed to be really great for kids , which ended up being ok for kids but not something that was going to keep their attention for longer than 15 minutes but that was long enough for us to get our Christmas ornament for the year (hi Grammie!).

Finally, we did the drive up to Siglufjörður (66° north!), which is a teensy little town right on the water that I read later is sometimes not accessible at all in the winter and it was here that we had our first bit of rain (we were very lucky the entire trip and didn’t get much rain at all even though October is supposedly the rainiest of all seasons in Iceland). We got in pretty late (6:30pm), dropped off our bags and walked down to the harbor to find some dinner:

The guy that rented us our house for the night said there were only two restaurants open in the winter, one that had homemade food and another that had fried food and pizza. Sadly the homemade food place was closed but we ended up having a great experience at Veitingastaðurinn Torgið where the hostess and waitress brought us out crayons and TOYS and generally made our dinner really fun. Food was good and we ended up having to run back up the hill to the house because it started hailing on us.

We stayed the night at the The Herringhouse, which if you ever get a chance to stay at, is very nice and has a shower that’s to die for.

If I ever get to go back, it looks like there are some really really neat hiking trails that are easily accessible from the town, would be amazing to hike up into the hills at sunset in the summer:
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What’s Going On Here?

My name is Aaron Johnson and I created this blog both for me (mostly) and sometimes you. I've been saving my deliciouspinboard.in links here and blogging since 2002. During the week (and at night and some weekends and well.. most of the time), I work in product management at a software company in Portland, Oregon. When I'm not working, I'm hanging out with my amazing wife, our dinosaur Star Wars loving son three boys and five chickens in the burbs outside of Portland, Oregon.